James 5:14-16 14 Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. 15 And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up. If they have sinned, they will be forgiven. 16 Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.
We are told in Scripture to pray for healing. We would not be told to pray for healing if God didn’t heal or if God didn’t want to heal. In fact, healing is largely what God does. We see here in James 5 that healing has a corporate component. We are to pray in faith for each other so that we can be healed. We are to do life in such a way, with great vulnerability and trust, even confessing our sins to one another, and praying for each other, so that we can be healed! Whether God chooses to heal in a particular circumstance or not doesn’t negate the fact that He can heal, He does heal, and He will heal in response to faith. If healing accomplishes His sovereign plan, which is always greater than the plan we have, He will heal. Take that to the bank. Whether God heals in the way we want Him to, it doesn’t change our assignment to pray for healing.
I want to talk to you about spiritual, physical and emotional healing and give you an opportunity to be anointed to receive one or more forms of healing. Let’s talk first about spiritual healing.
This is the greatest kind of healing. Spiritual healing is a kind of healing we all need and is a type of healing we will need multiple times throughout our lives. We are all born with a sickness. We all are sinners. That sweet, precious, innocent, darling, can-do-no-wrong baby that you hold in your arms and coo over is born a sinner. Romans 5:12 tells us we are all born with a sin nature, passed down from humanity’s parents, Adam and Eve. When they sinned, sin entered the world and into the soul of each person who was subsequently born. Not fair? Hard to believe? Because of one person’s sin or if you want to lump Adam and Eve together, because of the sin of two people we are all sinners? Yep. It is what it is.
If the “it is what it is” status couldn’t be changed, if there was no hope for us to be anything but sinners, we would all be doomed for destruction and there would be no reason for being here today. But wait, there is good news, great news! Romans 5:15 tells us, But the gift (the grace of God that comes through Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross) is not like the trespass (sin). God has a gift for us that isn’t like the sin that has been passed down. Watch this: For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!
What that means is this: Because of Adam’s sin, we were all made sinners, but because of Christ’s righteousness and sacrificial death, we can all be made righteous! This is spiritual healing. This is internal and eternal transformation.
Jesus’ primary passion and reason for coming to earth is to give us spiritual healing, it is to restore us in a right relationship with God. There are times in the Gospels that Jesus physically healed someone, and at the same time, He gave them forgiveness. He gave them spiritual healing. It is of no eternal value to be healed of your physical illness if you don’t have spiritual healing as well. At some point, all of us will face death. None of us will live in our earthly bodies forever. So, yes, while we desire to live well while we are here, there will come a point when “here” will be over and where we spend our “there,” where we spend our eternity, will be what is most important. Jesus came to give us peace with God and eternal life in Heaven. That is spiritual healing.
I Peter 2:24 is clear. “He himself bore our sins” in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; “by his wounds you have been healed.”.I Peter 2:24 The cross has made spiritual healing possible.
I also want to tell you that the works of the devil and his demons are still real. Satan still seeks to gain access to us, to mess with our peace, and to set up strongholds in our lives. Believers cannot be possessed by Satan, but they can be oppressed in different ways if we open ourselves to things that open the door for him. Spiritual healing comes when we are delivered from the ways Satan seeks to oppress us. I see Satan at work specifically in the area of addiction.
Addictions form because of decisions we make. When we don’t deal with life’s stress in a godly way, when Jesus isn’t our go-to, when we are looking for an escape from pressure, or when we are just longing to belong, to fit in somewhere, if we start to dabble with substances or pornography or other vices, we can quickly be caught up into dark places. The dark places are Satan’s domain.
I am excited to share that we are going to be starting addiction recovery for both women and men. I know the women’s meeting is slated to begin on Wednesday nights at 5:30 p.m. very soon. Stay tuned on more information for the men’s group. We are going to be moving into a special kind of healing ministry as we seek to help those steeped in addiction to find the healing that is possible in Christ.
Other needs for spiritual healing occur when believers dabble in the occult, when they pursue knowledge in dark ways through seances, palm reading, tarot cards, astrology, witchcraft, necromancy, and all forms of communicating with the dead, ghost hunting, black magic, fortune telling, the casting of spells, the wearing of charms, using Ouija boards and the like, they are opening themselves up to demonic activity in their lives. We cannot live naïve to the devil’s schemes. You can see this kind of stuff packaged as harmless board games at your favorite retailer. It is dark, dangerous and demonic, and if you have participated in that kind of activity, you may need spiritual healing and deliverance from the ways Satan has gained access to oppress you.
I am glad the life and ministry of Jesus, as outlined in the four Gospel books of the Bible, includes the ways Jesus dealt with Satan and demons. We should not naively think there is no longer any need for such. There is no way you can look at the world and evaluate the pain, suffering, brokenness, chaos, deception and lack of conviction and sorrow over sin and not see that Satan is involved in all of it. I John 3:8 says, For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil. Works, here, is plural. The devil has many tricks up his sleeve, and if you have fallen prey to any of them, you need spiritual healing to be free and healed of the wounds that have been created.
Let’s transition to physical healing.
Matthew 4:23-24 says,- 23 Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. 24 News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed; and he healed them.
This isn’t an isolated thing for Jesus. Physical healing was common. It was the reason crowds of people were following Him. Note that the text highlights that He healed every disease, every kind of disease. He didn’t only cure headaches or leprosy, but those who were blind, paralyzed, those with fevers, whatever the ailment, Jesus could and did heal.
Mark 5 tells the story of a woman with a 12-year-long bleeding disorder. That’s heavy and oppressive. How does a person endure that kind of illness for that long and still have the capacity to hope for healing? How does someone with something so major, so obvious, so embarrassing find their way through a crowd of people because she believed if she could just touch Jesus’ clothes, she would be healed? It’s a remarkable story.
You would think you would have given up after 12 years. You would think your faith would have been long gone. Here’s what I know: Her faith just hadn’t met the right object of her faith. When her faith met Jesus, she knew that she knew that she knew she would be healed.
She touched Him, and instantly she was healed. The bleeding stopped, and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering. (Mark 5:29) Oh, I want us to believe and pray boldly in faith today for people to feel in their bodies that their suffering has stopped! Jesus told the woman it was her faith that had healed her. Can you believe God for healing today?
Read the Gospels for yourself. That is Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. See how and who Jesus healed. Just read them and make a list of the people and ways Jesus healed them. Note the role that faith played in their healing. Notice when they also received a spiritual healing at the same time. Read the book of Acts. By this time, Jesus had ascended into Heaven, but when He left, He sent His Holy Spirit into the hearts and lives of His followers so that His spiritual and physical healing ministry could continue. Make a list of the healings in Acts and how they took place. Healing didn’t stop when Jesus ascended to the Father.
In our opening text from James 5:14-16, we are told to be anointed with oil, to have hands laid on us, to have someone pray a prayer in faith over us and that healing will come into our bodies. God wants to use His body (we are the Body of Christ) to bring health and healing to His body. We can all participate in the healing ministry of Jesus
The third kind of healing I want to mention is emotional healing
Isaiah 61 outlines the job description of the Messiah. Listen to what Jesus came to do: The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners,[a]
2 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God,
to comfort all who mourn, 3and provide for those who grieve in Zion—to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.
Binding up broken hearts, comforting all who mourn, giving people beauty from life’s ashes, walking us through mourning into times of joy, and clothing us with praise instead of despair wouldn’t be included in Jesus’ job description if we didn’t need Him to do those things for us.
God can heal the pain that comes from rejection and betrayal, abuse and abandonment, and the wounds that come from loss and grief. If you are dealing with emotional pain, Jesus has compassion on you. If you are dealing with emotional pain and you want to explore it beyond this moment, there is a great book, I would recommend to you. It’s called, “Healing for Damaged Emotions.”
God created us with a capacity to feel. We all have the ability to rejoice, to be fulfilled and satisfied, to experience happiness and even exhilaration. We also have the capacity to mourn, to hurt, to experience sadness, frustration, anxiety, fear and anger. It’s what we do with those feelings and those moments that is critical.
Our emotions are indicators to us about what is going on in our hearts. Emotions are indicators to us about what we really need. Use those positive emotions as reasons to thank God for the blessings of life. Use the negative emotions to lean on God as your Source for healing and help. Let your emotions connect you in a deeper way to God. Too many believers ignore their feelings and resist dealing with negative emotions. Pretending to be OK doesn’t make us Ok.
If we understand that the goal of discipleship is to be like Jesus, we can be glad to know He had feelings, and He expressed them. Jesus got angry more than once. It wasn’t His go-to, but it happened.
Jesus experienced grief. He wept at the tomb of Lazarus. Lazarus was His close friend. His sisters were close friends. He not only entered into their grief over the passing of their brother, but He felt the same in the moment.
Jesus had personal grief that manifested as drops of blood oozing from His forehead in the Garden of Gethsemane. It was grief that took a physical toll on His body. Can anyone relate to grief like that? The kind that makes you physically sick?
Jesus also experienced loneliness when His friends weren’t there for Him in His darkest hour. I’m sure we all have had that happen a time or two. The heaviness of those experiences is crushing.
Jesus expressed sadness over the future of Israel. He wanted something different than they wanted for themselves. We know that kind of sadness, the sadness over what could be, but just isn’t because people don’t want what God wants for them. It’s a real thing.
He also experienced joy and happiness at various times. The point is that Jesus was a deeply emotional person, and He freely expressed those emotions. He wasn’t stoic and static. He didn’t put on the happy face. He kept it real.
Being emotional didn’t keep Him from pleasing the Father and accomplishing His mission. He was emotional AND He didn’t sin. It’s possible for us to be emotional and to live a full and fulfilling life that is pleasing to God. If we want to be like Jesus in every way, we need God’s help to enable us to express our emotional selves appropriately and to find healing for the parts of us that have become wounded by people and circumstances that have taken life from us.
Our feelings remind us of our humanity which ought to remind us of our need for God. We can use our wounded feelings to draw us closer in fellowship with God. I love Psalm 34:18 that says that God comes close to those who are crushed in spirit. He does so, so that He can heal us. Satan wants to use our wounds to create trials for us. God wants to heal our wounds and create a testimony for us.
We have to be vulnerable and bring our need for emotional healing to the Lord. If we don’t, those wounds create additional problems for us. Bitterness, unforgiveness, hardness of heart…they can all set in and change who we are and who we are meant to become. We need to hand our emotional wounds to Jesus so that we don’t get derailed in our discipleship process and miss what God has for us.
Spiritual, physical and emotional healing are available to us through Christ. Let’s get what we came for. Let’s get what we need. Jesus healed. He still does. Let’s believe Him for it this morning.
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